Danny Wu‘s American: An Odyssey to 1947, a documentary that’s mostly but not entirely about the experience of genius filmmaker Orson Welles during the mid 1940s, will be released by Gravitas Ventures on 9.12.23.
A Wellesnet announcement, dated 8.4.23, says that the doc “follows the rise and fall of Welles while interweaving stories of diverse individuals amidst the backdrop of the Great Depression, World War II and the dropping of the Atomic Bomb.”
Synopsis: “Director Orson Welles navigated his meteoric Hollywood rise beginning in the early ’40s. As WWII begins a Japanese American boy visits abroad, and an African American soldier enlists in the U.S. Army. As the story advances, each character follows their own ambitions in search of their American identity. The doc’s first half is about the romantic rise of a great American director, and the second half transitioning into the realities of race and life in the Jim Crow era.”
I haven’t seen the film, but the title feels like a stopper….ungrammatical, inelegant. How does an odyssey go “to” a given year without mentioning the year of origin or the beginning of the arc? But let’s not dismiss or mischaracterize. I’m looking forward to it. Really.
Earlier today, however, I was struck by a remark from critic and author Joe McBride, a renowned Hollywood historian and Welles biographer who probably knows more about the late filmmaker (who died in ’85) than anyone else.
McBride: “Welles did a couple of shameful radio shows right after the Hiroshima bombing on 8.6.45, praising the dropping of it. I wonder if this film will ignore them.”
Shameful?
I replied to McBride as follows:
“Joe — The lives of tens of thousands of U.S. servicemen who would have been ordered to invade Japan were spared because of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bombings.
“What’s so shameful about Welles praising Truman’s decision to bomb Japan on 8.6.45 and 8.9.45?
“I am here and alive and breathing (ditto my sons Jett and Dylan and my granddaughter Sutton) because my Marine lieutenant dad, Jim Wells, wasn’t ordered to invade Japan. The odds of his surviving that assault were relatively low, or so he and his Marine comrades believed.
“Japanese leaders started the war, and despite their growing inability to prevail against U.S. forces during the final two years of the war, they refused to consider surrender when it was proposed in ‘45. They made their own fanatical bed.
“The A-bomb murders of roughly 200,000 Japanese citizens were beyond horrific, of course, but savage cruelty is in the basic DNA…the basic nature of war.
“So if Orson Welles praising the atomic bombings of Japan was shameful, as you’ve said, would it have been better for the U.S. to invade Japan and thereby invite a mass slaughter of U.S. troops? Is that what you’re saying?
“I’ll repeat it here and now: Awful as it may sound, it was better, from my perspective, that the Japanese suffered through a terrible atomic genocide than for my dad and God knows how many thousands of other American soldiers to have shed oceans of blood in the invasion. — Jeff”
McBride reply: “Read ‘The Decision To Use The Atomic Bomb‘ by Gar Alperovitz. It gives quite a different view (well-documented) on why the bombs were dropped. And listen to those two awful radio broadcasts, which are online.”
HE to McBride: “The Japanese bombings were about intimidating Russia, right? The basic either-or equation that I mentioned still stands.”